Jhumpa Lahiri, a 1993 graduate of our Fiction program in Creative Writing and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection Interpreter of Maladies, has an article in The New Yorker about her literary childhood, “Trading Stories: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship” :
What I really sought was a better-marked trail of my parents’ intellectual lives: bound and printed evidence of what they’d read, what had inspired and shaped their minds. A connection, via books, between them and me. But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down. My first experience of hearing stories aloud occurred the only time I met my maternal grandfather, when I was two, during my first visit to India. He would lie back on a bed and prop me up on his chest and invent things to tell me. I am told that the two of us stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, and that my grandfather kept extending these stories, because I insisted that they not end. [June 13 & 20, 2011, pp. 78-9]
